Browse
Herbs by Part Used
Root, bark, leaf, flower, seed, resin. Which part you use decides the chemistry you get, how it has to be prepared, and when it should be gathered — and on 40% of these plants, more than one part is medicine.
No herbs use this part yet.
The Point
One Plant Can Be Two Different Medicines
Dandelion is the clearest case. The leaf is a potassium-rich diuretic, used where fluid needs shifting without the mineral loss a conventional diuretic brings. The root is something else entirely — a bitter hepatic and cholagogue for sluggish digestion and poor fat tolerance. Same weed, same garden, two medicines with different indications.
Bael splits finer still: its unripe and ripe fruit are listed here as separate parts, because they behave as separate remedies and do not share a dose or a safety profile.
100 of the 248 herbs here — 40% — are used for more than one part. Which means a recipe that just says "dandelion" has not finished telling you what to buy.
Preparation
The Part Decides How It Has to Be Made
Plant tissues differ enormously in how readily they give anything up, and the method has to match. Roots and barks are dense, woody and defended: they need simmering, and often breaking down before the water ever gets near them. Leaves and flowers are the opposite — their chemistry is soluble and fragile, comes out in a covered cup in ten minutes, and is damaged by anything harsher.
Resins barely dissolve in water at all and want alcohol or fat, so a resin tea is mostly a wasted resin. And an essential oil is not really a preparation at all — the distillation already happened, concentrating the plant hundreds of times over, and what is left to get right is the dilution.
Get this wrong and the medicine is not weak, it is simply absent. Each part page sets out the methods that actually work for that tissue.
Harvest
When It Is Gathered Matters Nearly as Much
The same part off the same plant is a different medicine in a different month, because the plant moves its resources around the year. Roots are lifted in autumn or early spring, once the season's growth has been drawn back down into storage — by late spring the plant is already spending it again on new leaves.
Bark is stripped in spring as the sap rises and the inner bark lifts cleanly away. Leaves are cut before the flowers open, since leaf oils drop measurably once a plant commits to bloom. Flowers are picked at full opening on a dry morning — buds have not finished making their oils, and spent blooms have already shed them.
None of this is folklore. It is the plant's own calendar, and the part pages give the windows in detail.
Harvesting Well
Some Parts Cost the Plant
Take a leaf or a flower and the plant carries on. Take the root and you have killed it, and stripping bark all the way round a trunk does the same to a tree. That is worth knowing before you gather, not after.
The practical rules are simple enough. Take only what you will actually use. Never clear a stand — leave the strongest plants and enough of the rest to seed the patch back. Move around rather than returning to the same spot each year. For bark, work from prunings or a limb you have already cut, and never ring a living tree.
It is no accident that roots and barks dominate the at-risk lists. Both goldenseal and American ginseng are slow-growing woodland roots that two centuries of digging have badly depleted, and both are still sold freely. Where a leaf will do the job, it is often the better choice for reasons that have nothing to do with pharmacology. The conservation piece goes into where the real pressure sits.
The Odd Ones
And the Things That Are Not Plant Parts
The "Other" filter is a genuine catch-all — dried latex, insect medicines, cactus buttons, and a few preparations that fit none of the standard tissues. There is no part page behind it, because these have nothing useful in common beyond not fitting. Each one is gathered and prepared its own way, and its own monograph is the authority.
- Herbs by Action — what the plant does. The actions often differ between two parts of the same plant.
- Herbs by Body System — where it acts.
- Explore the Herbs — the full library, all 248 of them.
Clinical herbalist and the writer behind The Sunlight Experiment — an evidence-based pharmacopoeia of herbs, supplements, and the chemistry behind them.
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